Just Cause Eviction Protection for Tenants
The first bill was sponsored by Councilor Chuck Turner, who is working closely with the Massachusetts Alliance against Predatory Lending. MAPL currently has three pieces of legislation at the State House dealing with the issue of our current foreclosure crisis. On Wednesday, the Boston City Council approved a modified version of one of those three statutes, and three days ago there was a joint House and Senate hearing on all three bills – led by Senator Wilkerson, and Representatives Smizik, Malia, Brownsberger, and Lantigua – which I testified in support of.
Just four years ago, our city had about 20 foreclosures. This year we anticipate well over 2,000. There are currently 1,000 properties in Boston being listed for auction on foreclosure real estate sites in pre- and post-foreclosure process. Half of those foreclosures are on multifamily homes. In the last year, we’ve had 750 foreclosures on multifamily homes, with over 2,000 rental units affected in the City of Boston. Unfortunately, we think that number will rise even more over the next two years, as more balloon and ARM payments come due, as a result of some of the awful lending practices we’ve recently witnessed.
The impacts of these foreclosures have been devastating for a number of reasons.
1. Thousands of people who were preyed upon by sub-prime lenders will be made homeless, putting additional pressure on our shelters. These were individuals who were denied lawyers at their closing, who often asked about balloon payments and ARMs and were told it was nothing to worry about. They tried to do the responsible thing by buying a home, and asked the simple question of their lender “what can I afford” only to be given misleading information. These people and their families are being evicted from their foreclosed properties and sent out into the streets.
2. Thousands more renters, who paid their rents on time, who were responsible renters, and did nothing more wrong than rent from a foreclosed upon landlord, are facing eviction by these lenders. Current state law allows a lender to evict tenants from a property immediately after foreclosure, resulting in homes across the city being emptied out.
3. The repercussions of these empty homes are severe: abandoned, blighted, and boarded up properties are cropping up across the city, and looters are taking copper piping and appliances, making it ever harder to turn them over to new owners.
4. This creates a decline in all properties in a neighborhood, bringing in neighborhood decline, creating a cycle of neighborhood degradation.
I support the effort on Beacon Hill to pass all three major pieces of legislation, however the modified version of the Just Cause Eviction bill we passed in yesterday’s Council meeting is actually a very simple and would have a significant impact in Boston – especially in Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, and Hyde Park, where the foreclosure crisis has hit hardest.
When a foreclosure occurs on a rental property, this bill gives the renter the right to stay in their home, so long as they continue to pay the rent they were paying prior to foreclosure, and assuming they remain a tenant in good standing. This situation remains until one of two things happen:
1. The lender sells the foreclosed property to a new landlord or owner, who has the right to select their own tenants if they so choose; or
2. The lender still owns the property upon arrival of the law’s sunset clause, which is two years from passage (with the possibility of a third year extension if approved by the council and mayor).
The lender is required to notify the tenants of the foreclosure, so the tenant doesn’t continue to pay rent to the old owner – something which we have seen happen quite frequently.
This bill will help ensure that properties across Boston aren’t being emptied out, our neighborhoods are protected, and communities are ensured some stability until the foreclosured property is turned over at auction.
Bilingual Chinese Ballots
Currently federal law allows people 50 and over to become citizens of the United States without a language requirement. Yet for some reason, those same individuals are not able to vote in their language.
Imagine going to a Chinese restaurant and being handed a menu only in Chinese, and being asked to order your food. You’re at the mercy of the whims of whatever waiter you may have that day. Now imagine something as important as voting, and a translator looking over your shoulder, pointing to names on a ballot, and invading your privacy. Three hundred people came to City Hall Chambers last week to testify about the importance of legislation that would help them vote.
Last year, the Boston Elections Department did in fact transliterate names into Chinese, and the impact was impressive. While the city of Boston had some of the worst voter turnout we’d seen in a municipal election, that was not the case in Chinatown, and the ballot change was a large part of that equation. We also saw from this example that transliteration is revenue neutral – money spent on transliteration was offset by the need for fewer poll workers.
Unfortunately, transliteration is only used for municipal elections. The City of Boston does not have control over the ballots for State and Federal elections, which is why this legislation is being put forward.
Sponsored by Councilor Sam Yoon and now awaiting legislative approval, this Home Rule Petition would require ballots in precincts with a minimum threshold of Chinese voters to be available with Chinese transliterated names. Those transliterated names would have to be approved by the individuals running for office. While some have attempted to make the argument that Chinese characters have different meanings than the names of the person on the ballot, this seems pretty demeaning. Does any native English speaker get confused as to whether Tiger Woods is either a vicious feline or a tree?
These transliterated names are the same names that Chinese voters read in campaign literature and in Chinese newspapers, so this will reduce confusion and assist in voting and civic engagement – something we all should support.
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These are two major initiatives taken by the Boston City Council. They could certainly be seen as controversial in some quarters, yet we were able to get all 13 votes in both cases. Now we hope the state legislature will take up both pieces of legislation with all due haste.
If I have a lease, that lease ought to be honored by whomever now owns the property, and it doesn’t matter if the new owner got that property through a friendly buy/sell, a mortgage foreclosure, or a hostile takeover. You buy the assets, you get the liabilities and must honor the commitments.
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p>The proposed bill fairs an inequity and is good for neighborhood stability.
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p>As for (2):
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p>I did this for three months in a row last summer. Why? I lived in Shanghai and Wuhan and I don’t speak/read Chinese. To be more precise, after 3 months I could read about 50 words and speak about 50 words, not always the same. For 1 or 2 meals a day, I played “Russian Roulette” with my food. It’s no way to consistently enjoy a meal, and it’s certainly no way to exercise one’s civic duty. It’s not as simple as bringing in a poll card either — the very shape of the characters are so different that simple “matching” is really hard, even if the font is similar. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to match Chinese characters from one piece of paper against a list and picked incorrectly, even after taking my time. Now imagine your sight isn’t very good, or one list is hand written.
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p>Voting is every citizen’s right and duty, and there’s no reason for the government to not bend over backwards to ensure that every citizen — the blind, the feeble, the illiterate, or the just-recently-moved-in* — can exercise that right.
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p>* yes, I’m in favor of same day registration
for the foreclosing lender, and then we’ll talk.
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p>If your toilet is stopped up, who are you going to call? The landlord is gone. The bank doesn’t do toilets. Heck, the bank might be in Minnesota, or Hong Kong. It might not even be a bank, but a fund with 3 employees. They don’t have anyone to coordinate getting plumbers to fix toilets. But if they don’t fix the toilets, they can get crushed for landlord/tenant standard violations if they have tenants. This is why they must not have tenants. This is why they will not negotiate with tenants. They need you out, because tenants in the property are a potential for huge liability.
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p>Second, the foreclosure wipes out everything else on the title except things that are recorded earlier than the mortgage. Deeds, leases, other morgages. Everything. If it didn’t, every landlord with a mortgage would be required by the mortgagee to get waivers from the tenants anyway. Furthermore, if it didn’t, Massachusetts mortgage loans automatically get more expensive, and less available as national lenders leave the market (like insurers did) and those that remain factor in this gigantic risk.
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p>This proposal is (like the 90-day moratorium on foreclosure enacted last fall) likely to cause more harm than good.
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p>Yup, blame it on the lenders. These buyers were all the victims of unscrupulous mortgage companies, I’m sure.
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p>For Pete’s sake, if they were unable to understand the terms of their credit agreement perhaps they shouldn’t be buying homes in the first place.
Across the country. Must all be stupid.
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p>Yes, they probably shouldn’t have been buying homes… at least not homes 2 or 3 times more expensive than what they could reasonably have afforded through a legitimate bank. Too bad nobody told them before they signed.
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p>As for the multibillion dollar lenders? Yeah, they probably can actually afford to hire a property manager or two, which still ends up making them profits getting rent from these properties, rather than making them sit empty.
assumed that prices would always rise.
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p>Ooh, those evil corporations again, they can afford it.
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p>No matter that most defaulted mortgages are either held by teetering investment funds with few employees, or by “multibillion dollar lenders” like Bear Stearns, which went tits up, New Century Financial, which is in bankruptcy, and Ameriquest, which can barely fund the staff to service the performing loans in their portfolio.
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p>And you think that it would help to force them to hire “a property manager or two”? Councilor Ross indicates that there are 2,000 foreclosures last year; 1,000 presently, and 500+ multifamily. 500 multifamily units. That would make these guys with their one or two property managers one of the larger property management companies in the city and maybe the state.
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p>How could they possibly do it with just a few people? Worse, if they get overwhelmed by numbers and don’t fix heating systems promptly, they could get tagged hard for failing to meet housing standards. So, (i) lend $500,00 for a building; (ii) borrower defaults; (iii) foreclose and sell property after a few monts for $350K, resulting in a net loss of $150K to the lender, we get (iii) foreclose, and become a landlord, and get tagged for $500,000 because the plumbing wasn’t up to code and violated housing standards, and you can’t sell the building so easily because it is tenanted, so the net loss now becomes more than the value inintailly loansed.
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p>How many lenders do you think will sign up for that?
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p>And it would be a great thing for our local economy if we enact policies that make it even harder for people with good credit to borrow. Really, what we need is another few turns of the death spiral.
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p>Oh, and, I note that state legislation would be required. Do any of the mortgage lenders–say, Ameriquest– know anyone in the governor’s office?
“While some have attempted to make the argument that Chinese characters have different meanings than the names of the person on the ballot, this seems pretty demeaning. Does any native English speaker get confused as to whether Tiger Woods is either a vicious feline or a tree?”
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p>Thank you, thank you, thank you for making that point. I don’t know who told the Globe and Galvin that the “meanings” of the names would be a problem. Anyone with the most elementary understanding of Chinese – or English, love the Tiger Woods analogy – knows that was a spurious argument.
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p>Keep up the good work.
Ballot specimens, sample ballots should be displayed on the web so people can familiarize themselves with the format, the layout.
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p>It’s too late just to have them posted at the poll as people go to vote. Most times when people go to vote there are names or elections on the ballot that voters didn’t know were going to be on the ballot.